I don’t know when the last time was I looked at my blogroll.
To be honest, I don’t know when the 1st time was that I did a cleanse, maybe today was the 1st time, whatever the case it was a little soul destroying.
My mother was 87 when she died. There were times when the subject of her friends would come up, often in relation to her moving somewhere more manageable, maybe closer to her friends.
It was times like these that her eyes would gloss over, the tears welling in her eyes.
Her friends of course were gone. The world moves on, time passes, lives end and of course, relative to this post, blogs stop.
Often they just stop.
One of the hard parts about cleansing the blogroll was checking each blog.
There were a couple of bloggers that appeared to have just stopped on their “best post”. They are posts I remember well, even years down the track, posts I a confident received links from WoWInsider, they were just that good.
But… that was it… stopped… gone… but yet, still on my blog roll.
Bring Out Your Dead.
I wouldn’t have looked at the blogroll for a while to come if it wasn’t for Daraiste asking me the other day.
What will happen when you stop blogging… will your posts still be there?
I wasn’t sure what she meant and when I pressed her she responded with...
I have been hunting through your blogroll, looking for good things & Priestly things to read… but many of the links are dead ends.
It turns out that WordPress looks after their dead well, well at least the WordPress hosted blogs.
I’m guessing that Google culls their inactive Blogger blogs occasionally.
Many self-hosted blogs either just cease to exist, or get taken over by completely WoW-non-related sites.. most of which look nefarious of purpose, some are in some Asian font, but I suspect are also not quite right.
For the record.. when I decide not to continue to pay for gnomeaggedon.net, gnomeaggedon.wordpress.com will remain.
A fitting end.
So, I needed to cleanse my blogroll, but I needed to do it in such a way as to respect those, so many of those, that blogged before me and along side of me.
Ironically, Daraiste is a funeral director in real life, so that kind of inspired me.
Rather than removing all trace of those blogs and bloggers, I created new categories in my blog roll.. a kind of blog cemetery with categories of Gone but not forgotten.
So the job is done, I have buried my friends but ensured the have headstones to be remembered by.
Lest We Forget.
New Growth
Australia has a lot of bushfires, devastating bushfires.
When the ashes have cooled, there is no way to imagine that it will ever recover.
Some short time later though, new growth appears amongst the charred ruins of what was. What grows is similar, yet different to what was.
It is the same in the blogging world, there is new growth amongst the ruins of the old. Some old blogs remain, surrounded by smaller blogs reaching for the sky.
Each provides support for the other, the older blogs providing strong foundations and protection for the fledgling blogs, the newer blogs inspiring the older ones giving them the strength to remain strong and tall.
It appears I now have room on my blogroll for those of you not yet there. The ground is clearer, and visibility will be greater.
If you wish to have your WoW blog on my blogroll, then drop me a line and I will add it.
The Regrowth
The other things I have done is update and modify my BattleGnome page. I had been haphazzardly throwing links to my Battleground & PvP oriented posts up there. I have now categorized them, so hopefully those of you considering entering the BGs find it easier to find my thoughts on my experiences.
I have also consolidated my mental health posts and included some others from the past week. Mental health is a topic very dear to my heart and mind, so it seems appropriate that people find these sorts of resources more easily on my new HealthyGnome page.
On that note, I think it’s time for me to go dig a few more graves… I think this time I will make them Horde graves and scatter them around the battlegrounds.
Gnomer and Out!
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Oh good, I think I’ll consult the BattleGnome section. My leveling buddy is talking about doing BGs of which I know nothing but I feel I must stumble around in there supporting (hindering) them. I hope you have a PvP noob post!
1) They are all written by a PvP noob…
2) Yeah I have some starting ones there.
I pretty much as assume no knowledge when i write them, except in the case of my rants, then I assume people have read my posts
Toys of Azeroth added to blogroll
Oh my, so many blogs gone…that was a sad list to wander through
I know, it’s heart wrenching.
Some of them just haven’t posted in a while… so I guess I can hope that they, like me, are just having an extended vacation… but I think that is false hope.
PS: You have been added to the blogroll.. in the living section… in the Australasian/Oceanic & Wow Misc categories… I think this is correct?
Yes you are correct on both counts. I used to be purely mage, but then I branched out
Melbourne FTW! Thanks for adding me to the roll.
You have to hope that perhaps MoP might reawaken their interest, but really, since some have been gone for almost a year now…it’s not much to hope for really….
I doubt it will be the return of many, but maybe the source for new.
It’s funny the general anger towards the “Panda Expansion”, Apparently it’s very non-WoW, even though apparently the Pandas existed in the Warcraft universe before it became an MMO.
Meh.. whatever, I think people are just generally worn out, possibly with gaming in general (judging by the comments of some of my guildies that are in SWTOR and flirting with WoW again), 7 years is a long slog.
I wonder if people are just burned out in general and when looking for a reason see Pandas and think
“AhhHuh! Pandas… what is WoW coming to… I’m out!”
Yeah I can see how people could be burnt out, it can be pretty monotonous, but there are also plenty of people that find comfort in that sort of thing.
SWTOR was a massive disappointment for me personally, because they failed to do some pretty crucial things – I know WoW has had 7 years longer to be developed, but any good game developer would have borrowed as much as possible from the one game that has managed such a huge market share.
I think Panda’s are going to be my favourite expansion – however I have only just started getting into levelling alts and having other raid ready toons – so it has taken me 7 years to finally decide there was more to the game than my mage. By those calculations, I have at least another 7 years before I get bored with worrying about alts
Oo I am on there – thanks! However I can’t claim all of posterous – I’m just hosted on there – official title is ‘The Third Drawer’.
So many in the Australiasian/Oceanic category too that I didn’t know of/realise. – I’ll have to take a look.
Fixed.
Yes you are definitely there, but tbh no earlier than yesterday.
I discovered today that people I have been reading and feedreading for years weren’t on my blogroll. It think it just got to be that they were so familiar that “of course they are on the blogroll”.
I’ve corrected a few of those oversights in the last couple of days, but I expect there are more to come.
Just realised the WoW in an Hour link is the old domain too – it’s still up and about a wowinanhour.gameldar.com.
Came back to it trying to scout out a mage pvp blog (other than yours!) Thanks for Scroll of Resurrection I’m going to be getting my fingers dirty and icy…
back from the dead you are then, in multiple ways – fixed
Your blogroll is… eye boggling.
No wonder you don’t have time to read. Looking at your blogroll makes me scared about the amount I would need to read…
When my feedreader was full, I was always struggling to keep up… then the inevitable “Mark All As Read” was required.
My Blogroll is more of a bookmark page. Yes I read them, but not on any regular basis & I remember when I 1st discovered blogs, it was always so hard to find “one more blog”… so when I started writing, I tried to capture everything I came across… for my benefit as well as the reader’s.
Oh I was supposed to comment on the dead blogs. I am a regular culler of my blog roll, but people like Keeva stay around my twitter so she’s never really gone to me.
Yeah, at least many of the ex-bloggers are still Twitters.. still in the community whether writing or not.. often prolific commenters, so not lost to us.
I need to do some spring cleanup myself, nothing like a good air out of a blog to shake the dust out of the corners! *eyes the CSS she hasn’t messed with yet*
I’m not sure if you can use it, but there’s a WordPress plugin called Broken Link Checker by Janis Elsts that does what it says on the tin. It’ll provide you with a list of everything on the blogroll (and on the posts/pages) that’s not answering and it only takes a few seconds to find out if it’s really gone or if they just rearranged things.
Hobbies tend to be cyclical things, so I’m not really surprised the WoW community waxes and wanes. I played City of Heroes on and off for years before I finally wandered away from the game. My WoWing prior to dual-boxing heavily depended on if I had and friends that were still playing—and I’m only in Lotro because RL friends have kidnapped me thus.
Most of my WoW experience is second-hand through blogs (I don’t raid, I have horrible luck with rares, etc) so I certainly hope that folks hang around—but I also don’t expect them to. In the end blogging is supposed to be fun, and folks only hang around as long as the fun does.
And I’m too terrified of trying to keep up with Twitter, so… yeah.
I did a similar thing adding a “Hall of Fame”
It contains Out of Mana, Forbearance, BRK, Resto 4 Life, and PPI.